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Printed circuit boards are everywhere. They can be found on a smartphone a businessman uses, the computer that a call center agent works on, or on a tablet that a kid uses to play games. These devices work efficiently due to the support of PCBs. They can be readily bought in stores or can be ordered online; but for those who need a printed circuit board but has no budget to buy it, and resourceful and patient enough to create it, this can also be made at home using cheap materials.

For a DIY printed circuit board, the materials to work with designing process of PCB are as follows:

A copper-clad board, a glossy photo paper, a solution of ferric chloride, a small-hole drill, acetone, clothes iron, a tape, a cutter or a hacksaw blade, a marker, and water. Get more about DIY printed circuit board from pcbnet.com.

The first step is designing the desired pattern for the PCB. This can be done by drawing on the glossy photo paper. But to be more accurate, it is recommended to use computer software that enables to check the exact spots for fitting the components later. It will also ease the modification jobs and can be printed directly.

The next process will be printing the circuit design.

There are many methods to do this like photo transfer, milling, or direct transfer. However, the easiest way for a homemade PCB is the toner transfer method. This is through the use of a glossy photo paper and a laser jet printer. The design’s image is printed on the paper and has to be cut out.
Take the copper-clad board, which will serve as the actual circuit.

Precisely cut it out the same size of the paper. This can be done by using a sharp cutter for small-sized boards or a hacksaw blade for the larger ones. To ensure that the board is clean from any dirt, grease, or fingerprints, acetone is wiped through it. If there is no acetone present, then rubbing a metallic sponge until the board becomes shiny is beneficial; but take note that this is a time-consuming process.

The fourth step is attaching the design’s image to the copper-clad board. Tape the cut-out image; make sure that it faces down. Press the clothes’ iron onto it, which is set at the highest temperature within a period of five minutes. This is to melt the toner and the plastic, making it stick onto the board.

The next step is peeling off the paper from the board. Soak the entire board into a cup or basin of water, preferably boiling in about 25 minutes. This can separate the paper from the copper-clad board. The remaining paper remnants can also be manually peeled off. Take note that some parts of the print may be removed a bit, but you need not worry because it can be traced back using a permanent marker.

The board can now be etched.

During this process, you need a ferric chloride solution. For those who are unfamiliar about what ferric chloride is, it is an orange-black, sometimes brown solid solution which is slightly soluble in liquid. It has the ability to corrode or dissolve most of the metals, including copper. Submerging the board on the solution while stirring it in for about 10 minutes will remove the excess copper parts that were uncovered by the toner; but when using it, make sure to wear protective coverings such as gloves and masks.

After doing so, wipe away the toner with acetone or by simply dipping it again on a basin of water and scrubbing again with a metallic sponge. Now the copper pattern will be easily recognized.

The next step is drilling the holes for the circuit components using a small drill. Make sure that when drilling, no other surfaces will be damaged. Now the circuit components, as well as the wiring, can be attached. This will mark the completion of the homemade printing circuit board.

Making a DIY printed circuit board is very useful aside from being fun. Having a handmade PCB will also increase your knowledge about electrical circuits and other related components.

Every business goes through trying times. There are a lot of external factors that affect companies, such as the economy, politics, and the peace and order situation. There are internal factors, too, such as the status of finances and hierarchy within the organization.

However, there are times when you just don’t understand why your company is going through the worst. There is so much discontent, people are leaving, targets are not being met, partners are getting back their shares, and everything is just in the brink of a breakdown! Everyone is questioning but there are no answers in sight. You search for these answers in your company records, you even conduct investigations in stealth, but you find that all these just lead to more questions.

Now, let us tell you this: Could it be that you guys just need a break?

The Key to Harking Backto Glory

You know the iconic phrase “going back with a vengeance”? Guess what, all companies have the chance to do just that – to go back to their glory days even when they have experienced their worst crises! But their management needs to understand that there is only one key to do that: Start afresh.

But no, starting afresh does not necessarily mean that you have to re-launch or get a total overhaul of the company. Maybe what you just really need is what we have mentioned a while ago – take a break, bond with each other, foster a harmonious and unifying relationship with each other once more, and reserve some moments for internalizing what really happened and how all of you can get back up.

At times like this, we want to stress one thing: You will definitely be needing help. You will definitely need the services of a motivational speaker.

What a Speaker Can Do to Help

Some directors or managers will say, nah, that’s just a waste of time, or more commonly, that’s another item for the budget, and we can no longer afford it. But you said you wanted to get back up. You said you needed help to get the people back on track. If you find your head nodding after each of those two sentences, then this is our advice for you: Get a motivational speaker!

We know one who has already handled keynote events for over a hundred clients already, and the client list is still growing.Among these were General Electric, Sun Trust Investments, Lockheed Martin, American Express, AIM Investments, Sanofi-Aventis, Dow, Chase Manhattan Mortgage, Health and Fitness Magazine, Verizon, even the U.S. Navy, somefederal government agencies, and the World Bank! As you can see, these are companies that are known for their success and resiliency even in the face of economic crisis. Some have even been in the news due to bankruptcy issues but as you can see, they have miraculously harked back to business! We credit this to the amazing resolve of these organizations to keep making a difference in their respective fields with the help of a motivational speaker.

So, how did we do it for them? We’ll let you in on some of our secrets:

1. Our motivational speaker encourages the people in the organization to level up. Others sort of let you know where you’re good at, and then once you get intimately familiar with that skill and master using that, they stop. But for us, we believe that is just the beginning! We believe that the secret to an organization’s survival is they get to develop or learn new skills and tricks, because change and developments happen over time and it is important that we are always abreast with that.

2. Our speaker tells you what it really means to be successful. Success doesn’t stop at being recognized, it’s about ALWAYS being recognized! To be so, all the factors that play a role in your organization need to find their comfort zone in your organization all the time. We admit that this surprises almost every organization we have been to, because society dictates that you always get the best and most prized catch. But this we will tell you –in the real world, it is not necessarily the most decorated person who will grab everybody’s attention, but the person who most people can relate and are comfortable with.

3. Our speaker tells you to stop approaching problems like a kid! It is good for us to have the ability to laugh and brush off feelings of doubt when we are in trouble. But for an organization to really survive, they need to face and tackle problems head on. Our speaker will give you valuable instructions on how you are going to solve the puzzles and stay positive in spite of challenging times.

Being a golfer means buying some pretty expensive equipment that you’ll be using outdoors. Even a good sale at rockbottomgolf.com can’t ensure that your golf equipment will always be in tip-top shape, as taking good care of it is entirely up to you. You may have the right set of clubs and the perfect bag, but have you kept in mind the amount of cleaning each will need?

A guide to how to keep your golf equipment pristine and clean may seem a bit too basic, but it can help you determine the possible damage your clubs, tees and golf balls may encounter if not properly taken care of.

Storage

Before buying your golf bag, make sure that it has the right amount of dividers to ensure each golf club is safe from collision with another. It’s common to hear woods and irons clinking with one another in a golf bag as a golfer moves across a course. As normal as it seems, this is actually step one to damaged clubs. Be sure to keep them away from each other and store your clubs in separate pockets if available. If you have to keep multiple clubs in the same pocket, then be sure to get them head covers. These sock-like covers keep the head of your clubs cushioned and prevent damage when they move around the bag.
If you happen to live in a place where winter can reach freezing temperatures, then keeping your golf equipment in room temperature can be important. While the manufacturing of most golf balls allows them to be stored almost anywhere, the pressure and sudden force from a club while very cold will surely cause damage. Before playing, be sure to store your golf balls and clubs in room temperature if they were left out in the cold.

The same can be said for storing balls in very hot temperatures. Since golf balls are made of plastic and rubber, high heat can create deformities. A deformed ball is sure to not fly well, so it’s best to avoid keeping your golf balls away from scorching temperatures at all costs.

Cleaning

A long day of playing golf is will always leave you with dirty equipment. You may be too tired to clean your clubs, thinking that you can do so right before your next play, but keep in mind that the longer you leave dirt on your equipment, the higher the chances that these can retain permanent damage.

In cleaning your golf clubs, soak them for a while in warm water. After loosening and softening up the hard-packed dirt, add a bit of soap solution to the water. If you’ve got the money to spare, buying a professional golf equipment cleaning solution is best. If you want to save a bit of money then using normal dish soap is okay as well. Using a toothbrush or other medium to hard bristled brush, scrub along the grooves of the head to remove the dirt clogging them up.

Having a clean golf club head is important since this is what will come into contact with your golf ball to propel it. For the staff and handle of your woods and irons, simply using a damp rag is best to avoid damaging the material of the handle.

Golf balls tend to become the dirtiest, due to rolling through the course all day. Most golf balls can be easily cleaned with the above mentioned dish soap and warm water trick, but others may require more persistence. If stains other than normal dirt are found on the golf ball, then wiping acetone or ammonia will take care of it.

Taking diligent care of your golf equipment can be rewarding, as you not only save money that may be spent on buying new equipment, but also because it helps your loyal clubs and golf balls stay usable for longer periods of time. When you find your perfect sport partners at rockbottomgolf.com, you’ll want to make sure they have the longest lifespan possible.

Link building is the process of getting relevant websites to link to a page (or several pages) in yours. It is one of the most effective tools in getting higher search engine rankings. If successfully done, it could lead to more revenue for your business as well as create more awareness for your product or service.

Here are seven benefits of link building:

More visibility for your website. The first step to a successful marketing campaign is to reach out to as many people as possible. The more people who know about your product, the greater your chances of generating more sales. When more websites link back to your site, you get a lot of users who would check out your website and possibly share them to other users.

Referral traffic. More traffic to your website could mean more sales for you. If you can create highly reliable and informative content for your users, you most likely will attract more unique visitors to your site and could therefore increase traffic. And its a numbers game in business; convincing more users to visit your site translates to more earning opportunities.

More unique visitors for your website. If you can get a highly popular website which has a huge following to link back to your website, you could get their following to also follow you back. Make sure you are able to provide them with quality content.

Domain authority. Apart from getting more users, you gain competitive edge as well. Search engines will prefer your domain over other domains as you have already built more following for your site.

Top rankings. Your search engine ranks will greatly improve if you know how to create natural external links for your website. If users look for a product or service, Google or other major search engines will direct them to your site because of your search engine rankings.

More social media presence. Social media is one of the most effective tools a business can use to gain popularity and visibility online. However, it is essential for a business to create highly engaging content to get more social media shares on Facebook or Twitter.

Helps you reach out to your target audience. Link building allows you to target the right people for your product or service. So be careful with the websites that link back to you. It should be relevant to the product or the service that you are selling. Otherwise, you could get penalized by major search engines like Google.

Link building is cost effective. There are businesses who spend thousands of money advertising their business. Although their strategies could work it is still better to invest a little money on advertising. Your only investment with link building though, is your time.

More money for your business. When a popular site links back to you and customers trust that website, chances are those customers might consider you. They will check out your website and find out about the product or service you are offering. Better yet, they might even buy from you as they are influenced from that popular website that linked back to your site.

Link building is important if you want customers to know what you are selling. Not only will it help you market the product to the right audience, but it also helps you build good relationships with other businesses. If they link back to your site, make sure you check them out and link back to their site as well. Its sort of a combined effort. But all of these benefits lead to only one thing: More revenue for your business.

Any business that has a website will most likely find that it’s a lot harder to manage a site than in the past. Before, you could get away with setting up a 1 page site that gets a lot of traffic and that’s all. Simply sit back and watch the traffic roll in, and conversions rise through the roof. However, over time you will find that this strategy has been replaced. The reason being is simple, search engines have updated the way they deliver results and no longer placate the same results they did in the past. That means that small businesses and individuals will have to find a new way to compete, and it’s with SEO that many find a way to fight back. Without hiring a SEO company, you will be stepping up to a very difficult course of action. There are several reasons you need to hire a pro, and it’s going to be evident when you start to balance a few things out.

You Cannot Do Everything Yourself

There comes a point in every business, where the owners and founders have to let others help. You cannot just do it all on your own, it’s impossible. The largest companies in the world may have started with a couple of guys in a garage, but they eventually had to expand and continue to bring on more help. The same can be said in terms of online presences. You could easily omit hiring a SEO company, but you will find that your prowess may not be on par with an expert. In fact, many have tried to gain serious attention with SEO, and have fallen short of their goals. You need help with marketing, and that’s ok.

The Search Game is Ever Evolving

One of the main reasons you should hire a SEO company is because technology is changing faster than you can ever keep up with. Even if you have the best looking, best organized, and most amazing website today, you will need to optimize it for tomorrow’s changes. Algorithm changes from major search engines like Google, happen all the time. Some of the changes happen without warning, and without any date of recourse, so what works yesterday may fail today. That means that someone has to be looking out for your site and how to make sure that it’s always compliant in the framework of the search engine companies. Without that, your site may very well vanish from the online world as we know it.

Fixing Errors and Keeping Your Site Relevant

One of the most important reasons that you need to hire someone to help you with search engine optimization is simple, they can reverse penalties and fix the problems that you have. Some business owners have seen their traffic plummet, and some have even been delisted from search engines. When this happens, it becomes crucial to get professional help with implementing proper SEO. Otherwise, traffic will come to a screeching halt, and eventually you will see 0 hits on your site.

A good SEO company will highlight the problems that you are having, and change them properly. Whether it means deleting improper code, finding new backlinks, and getting your content marketing more attention, you will have a helping hand in fighting back against the technology shifts that could penalize your site’s efforts in the past.

Going at this alone is not a good idea. Just like homeowners need maintenance and contractors to come through every now and again, website owners need help from time to time. You may be able to maintain small pieces of it, but when it comes to reaching the widest audience, you need to hire someone that knows what they’re doing.

A professional SEO services provider is a company that creates relevant content for your website to help increase traffic and visits to your site using search engines. Its aim is to increase your site’s visibility by adding elements that search engines can use to verify whether your site’s content is worthy of getting the top search result.

In simple terms, an SEO services company enhances the content of your website so that whenever a search for a particular word or item is keyed into a search engine, your website will be the first on the list. Being first on the list of search results means your site is the first site that the “searcher” would visit. If he immediately likes what he sees in your site, you’ll have a guaranteed sale without even lifting a finger. If your search engine optimization service provider can do this for you, then they are doing their jobs right.

A professional SEO services company, besides managing the content of your website, also ensures that they build quality links that could add value to the content. This means that they build links that are relevant to the topic of your site and contains up to date information. They also make sure that each link is working properly and loads quickly. Website that loads quickly and efficiently makes the viewer feel at ease. It’s because they find your site easy to use and their transaction with you is satisfactory that they come back for more.

Quality links also mean links that point to relevant topics within your site to support the existing information about the item that they are viewing. For example, a page in hardware store’s website contains different colors of paint that a consumer can choose from. Once the customer decides on the paint color additional links to other related products like paint brush, roller brush, thinner etc. should be easily displayed within the same page in order to entice customers to buy more from your site. A good SEO services company can add relevant links based on the item that the customer is viewing.

Another great thing about getting a search engine optimization service provider is that these companies can continuously improve on your optimization. They analyze the data that they gather from when their services were contracted so that they can tweak and make adjustments to make it more effective. They have analytical tools and measurements that can track the progress of your site to know if the SEO method used is working. If it isn’t working, they can easily change their strategy to make it better and even provide you with a report as to why these strategies aren’t working.

The reports that the SEO Company provides also include detailed analysis of the website’s overall performance so that you will have an idea of how your business is doing. They analyze customer traffic, which content is really relevant and which are not, which items are selling and which ones are not. They also check how fast or how slow your site loads in different platforms like computers, tablets and mobile phones. This ensures that your audience can reach your site easily no matter what platform they are using. These kinds of analysis help make your website more effective at capturing the audience’s attention and keeping it.

Another advantage of hiring an SEO company is that they can give you different perspectives about your marketing strategies. They have highly trained professionals with great knowledge about how marketing works in the internet and their insights could be valuable to your business. They have algorithms and tools that measure different kinds of variables that affect your business and they can help you adjust your strategies based on these calculations.

Complete web redesign is another service that an SEO company can provide. When a website is outdated, its contents most likely become less relevant to the viewer. They get put off by the content and decide to leave the site altogether. This translates as a loss for your business. The content of your website should engage and entice customers into buying into whatever it is you are selling. It should appeal to the right target audience and should have content that’s relevant and up to date. The more up to date and relevant your contents are the higher your website will rank in the search engine’s algorithm. A higher ranking means a greater probability of your website being in the first page of the search results page. A complete website overhaul can give your website a fresh start and adds more interest from your viewers.

SEO companies also help clean up your website from redundant and duplicate content. This duplicate content usually lowers your site’s SEO ranking and could sometimes be sanctioned by Google and other search engines for being such. SEO companies ensure that the contents of our site are unique but at the same time contain the words that are mostly used by people whenever they are searching for the particular item you are selling. These words called keywords are the things that people type into the search engine to look for the particular item that they need. The keyword that you will use should be connected to the topic of your website to make it rank higher in the search engine’s ranking. The more your keywords match the item being searched, the more likely that the search engine will return your website when somebody searches for that particular item.

HTML head tags play an important role in the discovery and ranking of websites. Unfortunately, not many bloggers and website owners know that or even pay slight attention to HTML head tags. How does that affect their rankings and online reputation ratings?

Keywords are overrated by many people, thinking that they solely determine the ranking of websites in the search engine results pages (SERPs). While keywords do contribute to a website’s performance in search engines, there is more to SEO marketing than keyword placement alone. One of them is the usage of proper HTML head tags.

Basically, these tags are just keywords that are placed outside the body of an article. It is a matter of consciously using what to be placed where.

To explain how HTML head tags can help your website, here are their various types that you should work on.

1. Title tags

Yes, the placement of keywords in the first part of the title of a page is the most important aspect of on-page optimization. In one study, it has been proven that the keyword placement in the title of an article page highly affects the results of search engines.

Search engine crawlers first detect page titles as a representation of the relevance of the whole article. Thus, a title that says differently from the headline and body will be given a very low rating regardless if relevant keywords have been used in the entirety of the article.

The point of this is to stick with the keyword and make sure that it is truly discussed in the body and well represented in the title.

2. Meta description

No, it does not affect the ranking of websites in search engines, but it does matter in the discovery of relevant websites and pages to internet users because the keywords are bolded in the snippets that appear in the SERP when a search is done. Because of this, the click-through rate is increased, which in effect increases traffic and possibly, the conversion rate of pages.

Just do not expect a meta description to catapult you to the top of SERP because it is far from happening.

3. Meta keyword

A meta keyword is the snippet or word description of a website in addition to the meta description. It is not detected by crawlers but a meta keyword helps internet users in identifying the relevant websites to click once the SERP appears. It is like a word clue that makes sense when an internet user is presented by a lot of options by search engines (which is basically the case, usually in a list of 10 results per page).

Yahoo! used to consider meta keyword for website discovery (not for ranking), but since Microsoft already took over Yahoo’s search engine, this criterion has already been changed.

If there is good news here, it is the fact that smaller search engines and indexing sites still use meta keyword for ranking purposes.

4. Canonical URL tag

The use of canonical URL tag is more applicable to large websites that have thousands of webpages and dozens of subdomains. This is to prevent the possibility of creating URL duplicates and the reduction of link juice due to appended string of URLs. When a website has thousands of posts that talk about the same topic in the same niche, there is a big possibility of the creation of duplicate URLs, and that will definitely hurt the chances of being crawled properly.

5. Specialized meta tags

There are specialized meta tags used for websites that are offered by FGDC and DCMI. Unfortunately, tests have showed that they have no benefit to ranking and instead, only slow down the download of data.